Intellectual Virtues Education Project

Our project is based on the idea that fostering intellectual character virtues like wonder, curiosity, open-mindedness, fair-mindedness, creativity, and intellectual tenacity, honesty, and humility should be central to education. While some scholars have touched briefly or indirectly on this idea, no rigorous “intellectual virtues model” of education has been forthcoming. Our project is designed to facilitate the development and dissemination of such a model. The project consists of three primarily academic components and three more practically oriented components. LMU will be the grantee organization for each of these components. The first set of components includes a Workshop followed a year later by a Conference, both of which will bring together top scholars from several disciplines to discuss the role of intellectual character formation in education. Papers from the conference will be published in an Edited Volume for wide dissemination. These activities in turn will facilitate the writing of an Implementation Guide that provides a detailed account of how to incorporate an intellectual virtues approach in an educational setting. The second set of components includes the writing of an Implementation Guide that will detail the process for implementing an intellectual virtue model in an actual school setting, a series of six Pedagogical Seminars, and an online Intellectual Virtues and Education Resource Page. In the short term, the project will fill a major gap in the scholarly literature on the purpose of education, disseminate these ideas on a broad scale, and provide the resources for implementing them in a concrete educational context. In the long term, it stands to change scholarly and popular views of the very aims and approaches proper to education and to create generations of passionate learners and excellent thinkers.